The Élysée Palace is both a concrete point of departure in the novel’s account of an assassination threat and a political emblem in the history that produces it. Its courtyard first gathers the routines of presidential security into a tense, carefully observed scene; elsewhere, the palace’s name becomes shorthand for the authority that Marc Rodin and the OAS seek to overthrow.

Setting and the August 22 departure

On the evening of August 22, 1962, as Parisians left the heat of the city for the weekend, a Cabinet meeting continued inside the palace. In the tan-gravel front courtyard, sixteen black Citroën DS saloons stood nose to tail, enclosing three-quarters of the space. Their drivers waited in the shade along the west wall, exchanging idle complaints about the meeting’s unusual length.

Just before 7:30, an usher appeared behind the glass doors and gestured to the guards. The drivers dropped their half-smoked cigarettes, the security men straightened, and the iron gates opened. Ministers came down the steps, entered their cars in order of precedence, and left. Within ten minutes the courtyard had emptied of the Cabinet’s vehicles, leaving two long black DS 19s to move up to the steps.

The presidential convoy

At 7:45, Charles de Gaulle appeared behind the glass doors in his customary charcoal-grey suit and dark tie. He ushered his wife, Yvonne, out first and guided her down the steps. She entered the rear of the lead car on the left; de Gaulle joined her on the right. Their son-in-law, Alain de Boissieu, checked that both rear doors were shut before taking the front passenger seat beside the driver, Francis Marroux, a gendarme from Satory Camp and the President’s personal driver.

The second car carried another gendarme, Henri d’Jouder, and Jean Ducret, chief of the Presidential Security Corps. D’Jouder settled a heavy revolver beneath his arm and watched the pavements and street corners as the cars passed. These preparations make the palace a threshold between the formal rhythms of government and the exposed movement of its head of state. The scene establishes the convoy’s personnel and precautions; the palace is its point of departure, not the location of the attack described in the novel’s opening.

A political emblem

The palace’s significance reaches back beyond the convoy. After Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and founded the Fifth Republic, he took up residence at the Élysée Palace in January 1959. Rodin initially believed de Gaulle would give the Army the support needed to preserve French Algeria. When he concluded that the President’s policy did not include that outcome, his faith collapsed into hatred of the political system and, above all, of de Gaulle. The palace consequently becomes, in Rodin’s imagination, the seat of the betrayal he resents.

That resentment helped drive Rodin and his battalion into the failed 1961 putsch. When de Gaulle used radio broadcasts to rally the troops, 120 of Rodin’s officers, non-commissioned officers, and rankers remained with him; with other putschists, they formed the OAS. The palace is thus more than a backdrop to presidential ceremony: it marks the center of the authority the insurgents oppose. The novel’s contrast is sharp—inside its courtyard, guards and chauffeurs carry out an orderly departure; beyond it, the OAS’s political conflict makes the President’s life a target.